Architecture for kids podcast with Magali Thomson Architect at Great Ormond Street Hospital

Our profession needs to truly reflect the diversity of the places we are part of, therefore I fully embraced this podcast opportunity looking to promote our profession to children and parents.
 

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Magali Thompson. Magali is an architect working at Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is one of the world's leading children's hospitals. She's setting out vision to radically transform a polluted and traffic-dominated Durban Street next to the Children's Hospital. The vision is for a climate resilient, healthy and child-friendly street. She's particularly interested in preventative approaches to health and the impact our environment has on children's health outcomes. Children are extremely vulnerable due to the fact that their brains, lungs, immune systems are all undergoing rapid growth in the early years of their lives. Previously, Magali worked for 14 years at Marx Barfield Architects, where she was a director and specialised in education projects. Magali, thank you for coming to talk to me today, and I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_01: 1:56

Hi everyone, and thank you Antonio for inviting me.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00

What subjects were you good at school and what subjects would be your favourite if they were different?

SPEAKER_01: 2:07

That's a great question. At school, I really liked art. So, yeah, I was really keen on art and maths and I guess languages as well. My mum was Catalan and so I've been brought up bilingually. So, yeah, it was a combination of maths, arts and languages. Those were my favourite subjects.

SPEAKER_00: 2:30

And did they force you to your career prospect or where you are today in your career?

SPEAKER_01: 2:37

Yes, they definitely did. I think because I liked art and maths, a lot of people thought or suggested that architecture was a way of combining both of those. And I also had two strong role models in my family and that two of my aunts in Spain are both architects. So I had the opportunity of seeing what they were doing. And yeah, they were definitely a big influence in terms of encouraging me to take that direction. How

SPEAKER_00: 3:08

did that experience match your expectations, your studies as a student of architecture? So

SPEAKER_01: 3:14

I did my degree at Oxford Brookes University and then I took a year out in Barcelona and worked for an architectural practice there. And then I completed my studies at the Architectural Association in London. I think having the experience in Oxford Barcelona and London, which are very different scales of places and obviously in different countries. I think that was just really exciting as an experience. And at that age as well, obviously I started when I was 18. So I think Oxford was a fantastic city to start my journey in, in that it's quite a small city, very beautiful city, quite an easy city to be a student in and start to learn. And there were some great tutors there. And then my year out from Barcelona was fantastic. I obviously knew the city of Barcelona already as that's where my mum's from but it's an incredible city architecturally there's obviously the Gaudi and the rich architecture historically there as well as the Serva which is the grid formation of the city that was a huge influence and then the Arbosexual Association which is a very special place in London to do your diploma again with incredible incredible um tutors there and um so and in fact I've never really thought about it but I recently completed a master's in cities at the LSE the London School of Economics and I've ended up I mean maybe we'll talk about that in a moment but I've ended up looking more at cities than buildings actually so although I started my career at uh well at Mars Barfield Architects and several other places designing buildings I have ended up being more of an urban designer I suppose and looking at how cities are made up more than buildings.

SPEAKER_00: 5:08

And how did that sort of transition come about?

SPEAKER_01: 5:11

I probably spent 20 or 25 years doing buildings. I think I really enjoyed in particular focusing on schools which is what I was working on at Marks Barfield Architects. I loved sort of working on buildings that children were going to use for learning and I just found it a very rewarding experience working on those however when I was working on offices for example I think I found that less rewarding maybe in a way the focus was always to you know create raw square feet in a sense so that's when I kind of I could have carried on but I thought I just fancied a change so I applied to this program called public practice where you get placed normally in a local authority but I was placed at Great Ormond Street Hospital. And at the same time, I applied to go on this master's at the LSE, which looked at cities in terms of how they governed, in terms of sustainability, transport, placemaking. And I guess, so I was in my early, no, mid-40s, I suppose, when all of that was happening. And I was just getting more interested in the spaces in between buildings, really, and the fact that city, you know, more and more people move into cities and it was kind of making me think, what kind of cities do we want to live in? What kind of cities do our children want to live in? So there's always been, I guess, the underlying interest in children and how they perceive the world, whether it's a school or a city or a space. But yeah, I was beginning to focus more in the spaces in between.

SPEAKER_00: 6:53

So this transition into the Red Orland Street Hospital, your background as an architect, you specialise in Indian Yeah, great

SPEAKER_01: 7:12

question. There are quite a few challenges in that I would say that the hospital or most hospitals are quite inward looking because I think day to day at Great Orange Street Hospital, they're doing incredible things to look after very sick children and don't necessarily look outside their walls that much. And I think, um, I was trying to focus on for example the journey to the hospital being from the moment a family and their child gets a letter in the post so it's not just arriving into the hospital but how you travel there what that experience is like the journey from the nearest tube station which is Russell Square to the entrance of Great Ormond Street Hospital so I mean currently the street outside the hospital for example is very congested it's polluted it's full of ambulances. So it means that your journey to the hospital is quite stressful, really, and it's not an enjoyable experience. So you arrive already at the front door in sometimes a bit of a stressed frame of mind, I guess. So my work has been about creating what we're calling a healthy hospital street. Hopefully it'll be the first one in London, whereby we try and reduce the amount of traffic outside the hospital and just create places to sit and produce as much greenery as possible. So as many climate resilient solutions as possible, playful elements, maybe water, sensory planets, all that kind of thing. So yeah, that's sort of the long-term vision that we're aiming for.

SPEAKER_00: 8:54

In terms of the vision and what of your design, are you involving some of those kids in in the world.

SPEAKER_01: 9:01

Yes, definitely. There's a few examples. I mean, one of the things we worked on, there's an organisation called the Bernard Van Leer Foundation and they have a programme called Urban 95. That's very interesting in that 95 centimetres is the average height of a three-year-old or the healthy three-year-old. So one of the things I did was strap a camera on my son at 95 centimetres above the ground and we recorded his journey from Russell Square, which is the nearest tube station to the hospital to the main entrance. He did the journey with his dad, my husband. They didn't know the way and I told them not to use Google Maps because part of the reason for doing this was to see whether the wayfinding was clear, which it's not. The journey shows that they go wrong on a couple of occasions. But not only that, the film that we came out with at the end just showed how the experience was. At that height, Thomas had people's bags in his face coming out of the tube he could just see the back of people he was at the heights where you just sort of can't see over a car for example if you're trying to cross a road as well as obviously being quite close to exhaust pipes of cars and also it was just very grey I mean there was no joy in that journey at all and I think it's just really great to carry out exercises like that to understand the different sort of lived experience of the user groups that you're designing for and And another example is that at Great Ormond Street, we have a group called the YPF. So that's the Young People's Forum. And that's made up of young people and teenagers who've been treated at GOSH or are still being treated at GOSH. And they get involved in all our projects, actually. So they helped create the brief for what I'm working on. We've also got a new cancer centre for children that's going to be built. in the next five years or so. They were heavily involved in the briefing for that. And they're amazing. I did an exercise looking at ideas for the street with them and they just had so many suggestions. They were able to point me to examples in their local town where they'd go onto Google Earth and zoom into like a specific tree on their local high street and sort of show me. It's just incredible the amount of knowledge and how much they're able to contribute and yeah, that's been really, really useful.

SPEAKER_00: 11:37

Do you know if there is an impact or a potential impact on these kids' health by actually being involved in the shaping of this vision?

SPEAKER_01: 11:47

I don't know if we can measure how their involvement is helping their health, but I think just, I just think it's important. It's just something we need to do. I think when you look at the amount of children, so I think there are about 25% of London's population is under 18. And that's such a huge proportion that it seems it's just not right not to involve them. And I think there is a lot of sort of disillusion sometimes with children and teenagers in that they don't feel like they're asked or that they almost feel like, you of the conversation at all. So I think the more platforms that we give children and teenagers to contribute, the better because it's their future. And like I say, they have a huge amount of knowledge and contributions to make.

SPEAKER_00: 12:48

What will be the impacts on children's future and potential career choices as well as the built environment by involving them in these kind of initiatives?

SPEAKER_01: 12:59

I think it's really good good to involve them in terms of potential future careers, for example, because they may not necessarily have had access to see what architects or place shapers do. I guess my role isn't maybe, I started off more traditionally acting as an architect, whereas now I think I'm more client based and help them develop a brief and looking at spaces in between buildings. And I I think when children see opportunities like that, I think it helps open their eyes to the fact that architecture is a really wide career. It can go in so many different directions and different tangents that it gives lots of flexibility in that sense for future roles. I think certainly at my kids' school they had, for example, careers days. I think careers days are much better than when I was growing up where they were rubbish and we weren't told about many of the opportunities that are out there. But I think just seeing people like me and other architects in their day-to-day job and seeing what's involved in them can make a massive difference in terms of children maybe going in that direction or saying, I could do something like that, that looks interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 14:24

and the impact of that on the built environment?

SPEAKER_01: 14:26

The impact of the built environment, I would hope, is that we start to design spaces that reflect a much broader sort of segment of society. I think that the more varied and open the profession becomes to people from all walks of life with all different lived experiences can only mean that the products and what we end up with reflects society better. The work you're doing

SPEAKER_00: 14:56

at Great Ormond Street Hospital, how did the need for this new vision came about and what is in place and where are you designing this brief?

SPEAKER_01: 15:07

Yeah, I think the opportunity for the role arose because it's quite an unusual role. I'm not sure it exists in many other NHS trusts, but because we're designing a new cancer centre for children, that's going to replace the current frontage to Great Ormond Street Hospital. on street completely. And the director, she's no longer there, but the director at the time saw that as an opportunity to also address the street. I guess that when you get a new building, then its relationship to the street and the setting of the new building becomes more and more important. And I think there's been a growing realization as well that there's no point just treating children once they're in the hospital. We also need to treat the children and the environments that they're in. So there's more of a realization of how important our environment is and the impact it has on our health. In fact, 80% of our health is affected by our environment, which includes, you know, how we travel, what we eat, how much exercise we do, where we live, access to clean water, strong communities, all those kind of things. So I think it's a role. I'm hoping that there'll be more people doing this around hospitals because ironically the spaces around hospitals are often quite polluted and congested and you know it's definitely needed.

SPEAKER_00: 16:37

What has been the main challenges?

SPEAKER_01: 16:39

I think the main challenges have been that you know GOSH doesn't own the street it's a public highway so I've had the challenge of getting support for doing this internally within GOSH they have a lot of pressures of all kinds the NHS and this is something which is outside the red line boundary of their ownership so I've had to do a lot of work to demonstrate why it's important and then also it's involved lots of engagement with the local authority Camden they're a very forward looking local authority who have got very ambitious targets in terms of you know reducing car use and improving air quality they have lots of school streets which are similar principles to what we're hoping to achieve on our healthy hospital street so I've needed to get buy-in from Camden which we have buy-in from within Gov I think yeah one of the challenges well that's the biggest challenge probably is getting all the stakeholders involved you know to agree that it's worth pursuing and well the next stage will be to create a fundraising strategy so currently we have some designers LDA design who've done there are lots of great examples of public realm in London that they've worked on they're developing a concept design for us which will give us an idea of what it could look like and then we'll pause and start to talk to Camden about next steps and taking it forward and a fundraising strategy

SPEAKER_00: 18:18

and your role in this can you elaborate a little bit about

SPEAKER_01: 18:21

so my role I am acting at GOSH as a client and although I've also been using my architectural background as a client as well I suppose so sometimes I do probably end up slightly designing I try not to but I've worked on essentially starting off by doing all the analysis to find out why something needs to be done collecting data and tried to talk to local kids, local people, as well as people at the hospital to make an argument and get all the evidence for why change is needed. And that's all alluded into a brief, which I created. And the brief then developed into a vision of what we hoped for. So it was describing really the current situation, which is congested and full of traffic and polluted and what we're hoping to which is a child friendly and climate resilient beautiful street I realised early on that when you give people a brief and a vision which is just a list of words that's quite difficult to engage with so I also convinced the director at the time to give me a small budget to ask a designer to create a before and after image of what the street could look like And that was really useful because I think when people see an image, they can really start to get behind an idea. Whereas at the beginning, I was showing people a list of words and that was hard to respond to and to engage with.

SPEAKER_00: 20:08

How is people reacting to this word?

SPEAKER_01: 20:10

People seem really excited. I think that originally, well, it was something quite different. No one had looked at the street before. And I think with a lot of things like this, people think that it can't be changed the street has to be like that it's a hospital and that's what happens you know ambulances have to be there and there's loads of cars need to be there and maybe we don't question things or we don't challenge ourselves to do things differently so I think in fact I remember at the beginning a few people sort of saying that just can't be done so it's been really and I felt like that a few points as well probably but it's really it is really challenging because at to balance the logistics of a hospital and the fact that parents and children some do need to drop off near the hospital and you do need to have ambulances but I think it's a question of being a bit smarter about how we do things really we don't need to have 10 ambulances there all at once some of them we know are there for over an hour for example just waiting they could be distributed a little bit in the neighbourhood there could be ways of calling them in when they're needed we can try and stop the street traffic going through the street. I think it's been a really challenging brief for the traffic engineers in particular, in terms of traffic movement, but it can be done.

SPEAKER_00: 21:35

Yes, so in

SPEAKER_01: 21:37

terms of a team, at GOSH, it's me, really, and I'm part of the sustainability team who support me. Obviously, the work I'm doing aligns very much with everything that the sustainability team are doing at GOSH. And then, We tendered for a design team, which includes LDA. They also have a traffic engineer, cost consultant, lighting, Tilgill and Dinah Bournett, who I believe have been speaking on these, providing advice. And they're just appointed up to RIBA stage two, which is basically, they're designing a concept because that's as much money as I was able to negotiate the charity funding at this stage. And the part of the brief was, please give me a budget at the end of that because everyone's asking how much is it going to cost? And I'm like, well, I don't know yet. We need to do a bit of design work and then we can cost it and then we'll know. So I wouldn't like to throw in an amount at the moment, but the idea is that once they complete this work, we then start to work in partnership with Camden as to how we could fund it going forwards. I think it will be something... that is funded by a variety of different sources. I mean, we'll look to the GLA and TFL, the charity, Camden. Yeah, I think at the moment it's got a lot of support and a lot of excitement. I think Camden, because I think they were first in terms of doing school streets and they're keen to be the first healthy hospital street. We spoke to NHS England this week about it and that they were very positive and also presented at the EcoCity conference. So it's a concept, it's getting a bit of traction. So yeah, we'll keep, I can come again and let you know how it's going.

SPEAKER_00: 23:32

When did you start this process? How long do you revisit a process to take?

SPEAKER_01: 23:37

Yeah, it's taken a bit longer than I thought to get to where we are today. So I've been at GOSH three years. My original appointment was for 18 months, but I think the public sector is slow in terms of moving things like this forward. And it's been challenging just because it is outside our red line boundary. No one had done it before. I don't think, and obviously we had COVID when that happened, everyone in our team had to help with other things in the hospital in terms of just keeping that running. So it's taken longer than I thought to get to this stage, but I'd hope that it might get a bit quicker now. We've got the cancer center for children, which will start on site. towards the end of the year and we've got to wait till that's completed because there's no point in proving the streets if we've got a massive construction project on the street so it wouldn't be complete for about another five years having said that um it's quite what's quite good about the cancer center for children construction project is that they're going to have to make the street one way in order to build that and the ambulances are going to have to wait on the other side of the hospital so in a way it's going to act as a pilot study in terms of us being able to test out some of the things we'd like to keep doing once the building's complete. So the idea is that we collect as much data as possible during these five years to see what works.

SPEAKER_00: 25:10

You talk a lot about the spaces in between buildings. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what are those spaces?

SPEAKER_01: 25:17

In terms of Great Ormond Street Hospital, we have an island site where most of the services of the hospital are in one big building that's been added to over time. But we also have another building opposite Corr's Fields and three or four buildings. So I've approached it a little bit more as a campus. And the idea was that we start to consider the journeys in between our buildings, not only in terms of practical things like accessibility and width of pavements, but also as an experience in themselves. and as an opportunity to provide spaces for respite, benches, water, and as an opportunity also to integrate as many climate resilient measures as possible in terms of planting and shade, highlighting the fact that there's as much opportunity in those gaps in between buildings as there are in the buildings. And in terms of, for example, future master plans for a hospital, I would be trying to get the funding get the trust to really think about those spaces in between as well as the building requirements. Is

SPEAKER_00: 26:30

there a question I should have asked you and I haven't? What was the question?

SPEAKER_01: 26:34

So alongside the long-term vision we have for changing the street which is a while of pilot interventions and I've got a couple of examples of those. So one of them is a parklet and a parklet is when you take away the space that's normally taken up by a parked car and replace it with something else. So in this case we worked with a local maker who makes things out of timber and he used just trees from parks that had fallen down in a storm so that the materials are completely recycled and created a beautiful bench surrounded by plants which with air filtering qualities and you know interestingly on Great Ormond Street there's only one bench so we now have have another bench outside the main entrance to the hospital. It's used by local people as well as visitors to the hospital and staff. It's surrounded by plants but what's important about it is that it's very symbolic. It shows you what you can do with a space that's normally taken up by a car instead and just the amount of people that go on it each day just shows how it's such an efficient use of space as opposed to a car which might be for a couple of people. We have over two people using it a day and small projects like these are really important because they give people a flavour of a different future and the second example I had is of a play street so I think we've carried out three play streets now and we're planning a fourth one in September for World Car Free Day and what we do then is we close the street to traffic and it becomes a street just for children in the community and at the hospital to play in and it's amazing. We have like a fire engine, people playing bubbles, clowns, lots of different crafts activities, the police bring some police horses and it's a real opportunity for the hospital and the community to meet and for children to play and although we do have a few local parks to the hospital for children to go to, depending on how sick the child is, is they're actually too far whereas having play on the doorstep of the hospital means that it's actually feasible for some of the children to come out and play so I know that when we did it last June some children came down who hadn't left their hospital rooms for months in some cases with all the equipment that they need and doctors around them and everything so it's a very emotional and special day a real celebration and serves to as a very strong visual cue, if you like, to how the street could look in a different guise. Yes, I think that those pilot, shorter-term type projects are really important in terms of garnering support for your long-term vision. Brilliant, thanks very much, Anton.

SPEAKER_00: 29:43

Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and a review Thank you very much. Please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.